Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society is fun, fearless, furious and all female. A rollicking, delirious ride of a film, its appeal will be directly proportional to the viewers’ appetite for the wacky and the youthfulness of their mind. The British film turned out to be quite a popular crowd-pleaser at the Sundance Film Festival and is ready for a worldwide release this week.
Priya Kansara plays London-based schoolgirl Ria Khan, who is training in martial arts and has ambitions of becoming a renowned stuntwoman like her idol Eunice Huthart, even as she constantly battles her perennial rival and school bully Kovacs (Shona Babyemi). But life takes a major turn when she finds herself on an urgent mission to save her elder sister and an art school dropout Lena (Ritu Arya) from becoming “a trophy wife in a sham marriage”. What starts off as an attempt to dig out some dirt on her fiancée Salim Shah (Akshay Khanna) turns out to be an action adventure she wouldn’t have bargained for in her wildest dreams. Helping her emerge triumphant in executing a mad, deal-breaker heist at Lena’s wedding and becoming the true-blue “Fury” are her closest of buddies, Clara (Seraphina Beh) and Alba (Ella Bruccoleri).
Polite Society feels like a vibrant cross between Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham and Ms Marvel, the recent mini-series created by Bisha K. Ali. There are the familiar themes and arcs of sibling love, sisterhood, friendships, parental expectations and familial loyalty, arranged marriage, gender parity, and women’s liberation. All navigated under the larger umbrella of the hyphenated, British-South Asian culture and identity issues. Been there seen that?
Well, not quite. Where Manzoor scores is by telling the tale in a genre-bending style that is a non-stop mashup of superhero action of Hollywood, musical melodrama of Bollywood and Kungfu cinema of the East with an added dose of screwball comedy. An ideal fusion film which is rambunctious but also astute and perceptive when it comes to the world it is creating on screen. However, it wears its innate intelligence lightly and carries its audience along on a fun outing than being preachy or pedantic.
A deliberately heightened aesthetic suffuses the frames, be it the comic book energy of the lead or the medley of over-the-top characters surrounding her; the ludicrous, ominous, and nefarious plot twist involving genetics, cloning and a secret lab, the kitsch and colour suffusing the frames, costumes, and production design, or the nod to Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Devdas and Madhuri Dixit. A lot about the film might feel downright crazy and ridiculous but it is resolute in its belief in itself and what it is trying to say and hence the message reaches out to the audience as well.
Polite Society is a Priya Kansara show all the way; and she plays the headstrong, driven, suspicious, caustic but well-meaning Ria with immense relish and aplomb. The entire ensemble meshes well but it’s the popular British-Pakistani actor Nimra Bucha (earlier seen in the series Churails and Ms Marvel) as Raheela, the diabolical mother-in-law of Lena who steals the show by articulating the contradictions of womanhood with great flair and finesse. A woman ruled by her thwarted dreams, desires, and ambitions.
A woman who never got a chance to be what she was truly meant to be and who wants to use (rather abuse) her daughter-in-law to be a carrier, a vessel for a new version of herself. A woman who is seemingly liberated when it comes to young girls but is also a control freak around them. A woman who believes that “behind every successful man is a very tired mother” but is quite tiresome herself.
In the comic action musical, all does end well after all. Ria does decimate patriarchy with a Hindi film song, of all things, as the most potent weapon. But no it doesn’t turn out to be your usual wedding spectacle pretending to be a film. Fresh and fun and not just plain and frivolous, Polite Society does make for a delightful outing not just for the adolescents but the adolescent soul lurking within every adult.
Cinema Without Borders
In this weekly column, the writer introduces you to powerful cinema from across the world
Film: Polite Society